Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Don't paste the AI, please

dontpastetheai.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 632 posts

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#491

Post by prepend »

rpdillon wrote: post #382
Forgeties79 wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what’s the equivalent of “google it yourself” these days? Do you actually say that to people? Edit: i’ve hit the comment limit per given time, but all I have to say is “what have you found so far?” And “Google it yourself” are radically different responses man. The former is far more reasonable, it shows you are willing to be helpful and is a productive question. The other is just rude and implies your time is too…

People are lazy as hell, and I've noticed it's getting worse. My old team called this "remote brain execution" (because we work with Bazel and they have something called RBE) where folks would just drop questions in Slack and just ask the team to solve it for them. We were taken aback by how little work people would do before doing this. We developed the phrase: "What have you tried so far?" to try and counteract thi…

I like to point people toward ESR’s “how to ask questions the smart way” [0] to new people as it takes some work to learn that questions are about investigations and collaboration, not tasking.

[0] https://catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#492

Post by prepend »

m3kw9 wrote: post #389
jillesvangurp wrote: post #308

The complaint here is about lazy answers. But what about all the lazy questions? What's the equivalent of "Google it yourself" these days? When you ask something of somebody, the expectation of the other side to drop everything and do work for you isn't always appropriate/balanced/appreciated. The underlying problem here is that communication is hard; especially if it's not face to face. People can't read your mind o…

Most times if we just google it, we'd have no conversation. Human interaction over.

Minimizing human interaction is a feature not a bug.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#493

Post by cindyllm »

elmo-shrugged wrote: post #360
criddell wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Summarize 9 short sentences?

yes - this is what people are doing in my workplace, unfortunately. you can write the most concise and effective documentation possible for a feature of some complexity, and people will still be asking their chatbot to make a soundbite out of it. it's infuriating.

[dead]

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#494

Post by runarberg »

RugnirViking wrote: post #19

yes, its all ai writing. A bunch of the metaphors here dont make sense. "read it all, yes even the bullets. especially the bullets" if you read one thing from a large wall of text, its gonna be the bullet points, right? thats a big part of what they're for? "It is the conversational equivalent of forwarding the email." this is a terrible metaphor. it seems to rely on the idea you would be mad if you sent an email to…

I actually suspected it from the title, so I didn’t even open TFA.

The advice in the title is a cop-out of someone who thinks writing with AI is fine actually, as long as you just don‘t paste the whole thing. In other words, it sounds like someone who thinks they can outsmart AI-writing by using AI differently.

I was open to the fact that this might be a clickbait (so I read the comments first) but from this post, it looks like my intuition was right.

To clarify, I am a firm believer you should not use AI for any part of your writing, no AI-drafts, no AI-skeletons, no AI-research, no AI-nothing. AI pollutes your writing, and just makes it bad however you use it.

A simpler rule of thumb (which I abide to) is just don‘t use AI at all. It is bad for your brain, and highly addictive, and also bad for society and the environment. When you use AI you are only putting bad stuff out in the world and supporting te AI-companies, who are profiting off of all this damage they are causing.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#495

Post by throwaway98797 »

joshred wrote: post #432
throwaway98797 wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it’s passive aggressive. ultimately it’s better to not inform and start ignoring these people. let natural selection work.

What's passive about it?

don’t use ai when you write emails to me.

that’s direct and aggressive.

framing it as advice is the passive part.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#496

Post by prepend »

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #412
bluGill wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always tell people "Here is the documentation, please tell me what is hard to understand so I can fix it". When someone is new on my team I tell them "here is our team documentation, your first task is to fix it so that the next person can follow the directions correctly". That is I make the conversation not about them reading the manual, but about making it worth reading. There is a large amount of really bad docu…

If your customers or colleagues are asking questions answered by your documentation, it's often a good sign your documentation has some challenges: dense; intimidating; inaccessible; or not easy to search for the specific information you want. Take this valuable signal as a gift, letting you know there is an opportunity to improve the documentation. You could become known as a helpful person, rather than a maybe-effi…

> good sign your documentation has some challenges: dense; intimidating; inaccessible; or not easy to search for the specific information you want

Of course it does. And it’s not “my documentation” it’s ours. And everyone is responsible for improving it. It’s not about pointing out that documentation sucks, it’s about working to improve it.

I don’t have a documentarian on my team. No one’s main job is to write docs. So we all get to help each other by gradually improving the docs. And if I help someone with something not in the docs then the recipient gets to include that missing info into the docs to help the next person.

We also added a hat for a rotating role called “Benevolent Documentation Czar for the Quarter” where that person gets to explicitly improve team docs. Maybe like 5% of their time.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#497

Post by throwaway98797 »

setgree wrote: post #453
throwaway98797 wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it’s passive aggressive. ultimately it’s better to not inform and start ignoring these people. let natural selection work.

What I wrote was neither passive nor aggressive. My telling you now that I think your response was ill-considered is also not passive aggressive, though it's arguably aggressive.

this maybe a me issue

any kind of softness in language like “i’ll-considered” sounds so sterile that i sense hatred underneath. too much time in big companies.

more sharing a crazy person take on how different words can be interpreted counter to the intent.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#498

Post by prepend »

winstonp wrote: post #316
biztos wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The WhatsApp voice message is very common in Spain. I always find it jarring when I'm there, mostly because I'm not used to it, but also because it seems to defeat the purpose of the messaging app: I can't listen to your voice message on the bus, for instance. It's so normalized there that I wonder whether this is a particularly Spanish habit. Maybe there are a bunch of countries where people routinely leave each oth…

It's a habit in specific countries, China is one in my experience.

It’s funny to me how I judge some cultural aspects as being worse. Of course it’s my own cultural bias, but I think the following things are “bad” for cultures to do:

1) long voice memos over succinctly typed notes

2) not forming lines/queues and just mobbing the train/shop/etc

3) habitually late or not on time

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#499

Post by throwaway98797 »

geysersam wrote: post #474
throwaway98797 wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it’s passive aggressive. ultimately it’s better to not inform and start ignoring these people. let natural selection work.

Why is it passive aggressive?

when people write me ai slop.

i either ignore. or if i trust them i just say “don’t use ai slop”.

anything softer is passive and morally judgy too.

i’m not here to tell them what’s globally right, only how i want them to interact with me.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#500

Post by prepend »

jeltz wrote: post #446
mapontosevenths wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literacy is dying. I suspect that's part of the reason some people hate AI. To the semi-literate a few paragraphs of text represent a significant investment of their time.

In my experience it is the semi literate people who love generative AI the most. The people who struggled to form sentenced and hated reading.

I think some people suck (myself included) at writing and are amazed that they can finally generate text (fortunately not myself).

So their output from an llm has the halo/ikea/endowment effect and they want to show off what they “wrote.”

Writing is actually super easy. Editing and writing well is the hard part. It’s like co-workers who wrote a terrible book being excited just because they wrote a book.

Post reply on HN